Timothy Geithner’s been showered with criticism in light of the economic meltdown, but does it deserve it all? Photograph by Fresh Conservative on flickr.com.
Enter Timothy Geithner, the man of the hour, just last week paraded through the House in a small populist ceremony, a rite of exfoliating outrage. Wasn’t he the perfect whipping boy? Calm, assertive, with a hint of Robert McNamara’s steely assurance—Geithner might have been every man’s wolf in sheep’s clothing as he faced a battery of accusations surrounding his involvement in AIG’s titanic bailout.
Geithner, the onetime President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, now Secretary of the Treasury, now stares down the barrel of a host of charges that would place him at the ever-tense nexus of Wall Street power and Main Street outrage.
The obvious and common argument is that Geithner is guilty by implication. As the story now seems to go, Geithner’s hands were simply too close to some sordid doings—in shortest form, the Fed’s recommendation to AIG that it not reveal information about overvalued, politically suspect “counterparty” payments to other major banks with holdings in the company—despite his having resigned from the Fed and recused himself from its future doings. Issues like these, it need not be said, do not lend themselves to nuanced reasoning. Today, finance finds its alternate definition in guilt—an irredeemable stain on the record of any politician unlucky enough to be on the wrong side of popular rage. Where the economy continues to falter, and where Wall Street connections loom in the background, Geithner will be an object of derision and distrust.
This, you could say, is where the dialogue loses its momentum, and when the political sharks begin to circle. It’s here, too, that the narrative arc of Geithner’s story freezes between two poles that depend on one another for their dramatic tension. In one corner, there’s populist fire and brimstone; Geithner, here, is a conduit for the survival of moneyed interests within a system whose excess was its undoing rather than an agent of an outraged people—the herald, as it were, of a morally bankrupt and ever-powerful status quo’s endurance into the future. In the other corner is the image of Geithner as multi-billion-dollar bearer of necessary evil, an inside man whose position was less a measure of his corruption than it was of his ability to do the necessary thing, whether right or popular. Which side do we pick, and where do we—as citizens—choose (or not choose) to draw the battle lines?
We’re inclined to believe that the answer to this question lies in the answer to another, much simpler one. Did Geithner behave in a way that was morally and ethically suspect, or did he not? At the end of the day, there has to be some factual truth at the bottom of this inherently necessary inquiry, and we might guess that it lies somewhere in the middle—Geithner the public servant and Geithner the inside man worked in tandem, each bound by what must have seemed like, in a time of crisis, suffocating institutional logic on public and private ends of the equation. Yet that truth is well beyond the scope of this column, and we might guess that it’ll be well beyond the public imagination for some time to come as well. For it’s rarely, if ever, the nature of events like these to disclose themselves until well after the worst is over. What we instead get are stories for our time—stories whose utility lies not in factual resolution but instead in a kind of popular therapy.
Why, after all, has Geithner’s skewering unfolded without his ousting, or without some fundamental policy shifts within the Obama administration? Geithner’s ordeal has been, it would seem, a lukewarm crucifixion capable of sustaining itself indefinitely. And this is its brilliance as a narrative device—Geithner has become at once a lightening rod and sponge for angry catharsis, capable of enduring pundits’ wrath without pushing the boundaries of political acceptability too far afield. If Obama is a fundamentally pragmatic president, as has seemed (despite soaring rhetoric and enthusiasm) to be the case so far, his willingness to retain Geithner speaks to a keen understanding of tortured compromise as both policy and presentation. Without throwing his treasury secretary, and his policy, to the wolves, Obama navigated more severe calculations of public right and private wrong by placing authority in the hands of a morally gray technocrat. But where are we left when, frustrated, jobless, and frenzied with betrayal, we abstract our anger and thereby sap it of propulsive force?
Maybe that’s a question we just don’t want to ask. Maybe the intimate details of some high-profile stories, for all our good intentions and furious energy, are sometimes condemned to history’s garbage pail, indefinitely obscured, psychologically and emotionally inaccessible. And maybe these details, the essential meat, the lifeblood, of political drama, are denied to us—lost as we are in the face of a system broken beyond our understanding—by our own willing. To expose them or to treat them too frankly would be, really, to take the taut, tortured entertainment out of those narratives necessary to sustain a country in need.
